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Ingredients & Recipes

'Leon serves food that is fresh, seasonal, locally sources and really good. The twist is that your food is served really fast. The double twist is how delicious it is.' - Vogue The first Leon restaurant, in London's Carnaby Street, opened its doors in July 2004. For its founders - Henry Dimbleby, John Vincent and Allegra McEvedy - the aim was to change the face of fast food, by bringing fresh, wholesome cooking to the high street. Six months later, Leon was named the Best New Restaurant in Great Britain at the Observer Food Monthly Awards. The menu is based around bold flavours, using simply-cooked fresh, local, natural ingredients with an emphasis on seasonal dishes; it also reflects how our eating habits change as the daylight house get longer and shorter. This is a book of two halves. The Ingredients Book arms you with everything you need to know about the basic building blocks of any recipe. LEON chooses its ingredients above all for their flavour and healthiness but also with a view to the world we live in, so that such shark-infested waters as sustainable fish are tackled and easy to navigate. LEON's top 250 fruits, vegetables, fish, meats, dairy and store cupboard ingredients are all given their own entries. Nutrition, a bit of history, flavour and the best way to get the most out of them are all covered, seasoned with a fair amount of random miscellany. The second half is The Recipe Book, where you can put your newly found knowledge of ingredients to great use with over 140 recipes: some are familiar favourites taken from LEON's menus such as the Original Superfood Salad, Moroccan Meatballs or Magic Mackerel Couscous and, for LEON Lovers everywhere, at last a recipe for the coveted LEON Better Brownie. Plus there are some recipes from the founders, their friends and those who helped make LEON what it is today, like Fred's Millennium Octopus and David Dimbleby's Spanish Omelette. LEON's food message is a simple and honest one - cook and eat with the best ingredients available and don't forget the naughty bits that are so necessary for a fully-rounded life.

Larousse Gastronomique has been the foremost resource of culinary knowledge since its initial publication in 1938. Long revered for its encyclopedic entries on everything from cooking techniques, ingredients, and recipes to equipment, food histories, and culinary biographies, it is the one book every professional chef and avid home cook must have on his or her kitchen shelf. In fact, Julia Child once wrote, "If I were allowed only one reference book in my library, Larousse Gastronomique would be it, without question."

The culinary landscape has changed dramatically in the last decade, prompting a complete revision of this classic work. Larousse Gastronomique has now been updated to add the latest advancements that have forever changed the way we cook, including modern technological methods, such as sous-vide cooking and molecular gastronomy. All-new color ingredient-identification photographs give this edition a fresh, elegant look. And for the first time, Larousse features more than 400 reportage photos–candid images of upscale restaurants from around the world–that give behind-the-scenes access into the kitchens where the finest food is created. Dozens of new biographies of people who have made significant contributions to the food world debut in this revision, including such luminaries as Ferran Adrià, Daniel Boulud, Alice Waters, Gaston Lenôtre, Thomas Keller, James Beard, and Julia Child.

With entries arranged in encyclopedic fashion, Larousse Gastronomique is not only incredibly user-friendly, but it is also a fantastic read for anyone who loves food. Skip from Roasting to Robert (a classic French sauce), and then to Robiola (the Italian cheese); or go from Sake to Salad–with dozens of recipes–and on to Salamander, a type of oven used in professional kitchens for caramelizing (and named after the legendary fire-resistant animal). An index at the end of the book of all 3,800 recipes for cuisines from around the world makes it easy to find a myriad of preparations for any ingredient (eggs or chicken, for example) or type of dish (such as cakes or sauces).

The unparalleled depth and breadth of information–from the traditional to the cutting-edge–make this newest edition of Larousse Gastronomique indispensable for every cook.

Here on display in this must-have collection is the cooking artistry, gift for teaching, and relaxed, confidence-inspiring tone known so well by Nathalie Dupree's enthusiastic nationwide audience. Many of the dishes prepared on New Southern Cooking with Nathalie Dupree (the fifty-five-part television series that has aired on PBS, the Learning Channel, and Star TV) are included, and a great many more: dishes simple or elaborate, dishes for a weekday meal or a multicourse feast, dishes such as a timeless, crumbly, melt-in-the-mouth biscuit or a tantalizing Grilled Duck with Muscadine Sauce.

You'll find all the old-time flavors and textures embodied in such classic delights as black-eyed peas, fried chicken with the crustiest of coatings, country ham, and peach cobbler. Here, too, is all the new lightness and flavor combinations that mark today's innovative Southern cooking-expressed in such recipes as Acadian Peppered Shrimp (made tangy with just the right touches of basil, garlic, oregano, and cayenne), chicken breasts with stir-fried peanuts and collards, and grouper grilled over a pecan-seasoned fire.

Nathalie Dupree shows us how to get that Southern aura of comfort and welcome into our meals. She draws on the many cuisines, rustic and elegant, that have profoundly influenced Southern cooking from its beginnings―including English, French, African, Spanish, and West Indian. Nathalie has provided a wonderfully wide-ranging selection of Southern recipes remarkable for their ease of preparation and perfectly tuned to the pace of our lives today.

Recipes from Southern Appalachia

There are very few books on southern Appalachian cooking. Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly will be a beautiful keepsake for tourists and locals alike that preserves the food of the southern mountain people.

There are many cookbooks about Southern cooking, but precious few celebrate the southern Appalachian food that has sustained mountain folk past and present. Thankfully, we now have Joan E. Aller's Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly.

Featuring more than 150 recipes for down-home, soul-satisfying dishes, Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly is more than just a cookbook. Complete with passages on the history, places, and people of southern Appalachia, along with lush full-color photography of the food and scenery of the southern Appalachian Mountains, Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly serves as both a cookbook and a guided tour of the local lore, traditions, and culture of this uniquely American region.

"Extraordinary," "poetic," and "inspired" are only a few words that have been used to describe the food at Chez Panisse. Since the first meal served there in 1971, Alice Waters's Berkeley, California, restaurant has revolutionized American cooking, earning its place among the truly great restaurants of the world. Renowned for the brilliant innovations of its ever-changing menu, Chez Panisse has also come to represent a culinary philosophy inspired by nature -- dedicated to the common interest of environment and consumer in the use of gloriously fresh organic ingredients.

In Chez Panisse Cooking, chef Paul Bertolli -- one of the most talented chefs ever to work with Alice Waters -- presents the Chez Panisse kitchen's explorations and reexaminations of earlier triumphs. Expanding upon -- and sometimes simplifying -- the concepts that have made Chez Panisse legendary, Bertolli provides reflections, recipes, and menus that lead the cook to a critical and intuitive understanding of food itself, of its purest organic sources and most sublime uses. Perhaps best described by Richard Olney, "Paul Bertolli's cuisine is what 'health food' should be and never is: a celebration of purity. The food is imaginative but never complicated; it is art."

Enhanced by Gail Skoff's breathtaking hand-colored photographs, Paul Bertolli's recipes remind us of the simple and passionate joys in cooking and of the inspiration to be drawn from each season's freshest foods: glistening local salmon creates a wildly colorful springtime carpaccio or is grilled later in the season with tomatoes and basil vinaigrette; autumn's fresh white truffles are sliced into an extraordinarily textured salad of pastel hues with fennel, mushrooms, and Parmesan cheese; figs left on the tree until they grow heavy and sweet appear in a fall fruit salad with warm goat cheese and herb toast. Season by season, Chez Panisse Cooking will captivate the senses and imagination of the cook with such entrancing recipes as Sugar Snap Peas with Brown Butter and Sage; Buckwheat Cakes with Smoked Salmon, Creme Fraiche, and Capers; Grilled Fish Wrapped in Fig Leaves with Red Wine Sauce; Lamb Salad with Garden Lettuces, Straw Potatoes, and Garlic Sauce; Marinated Veal Chops Grilled over an Oak Fire; or Seckel Pears Poached in Red Wine with Burnt Caramel. Here, some of the restaurant's most remarkable recent menus for special occasions are recreated, from a White Truffle Dinner to the Chez Panisse Tenth Annual Garlic Festival, to a supper for poet Vikram Seth that began. with "The Season's song, a summer ballad/Tomatoes, basil, flowers, beans/In unison dance, Lobster Salad..."

Many of these recipes reflect Paul Bertolli's love of northern Italian food; for other dishes, the inspiration is French; in all, there is a keen awareness of the abundance of uncompromisingly pure, seasonal ingredients to be found in America.

Above all, the Chez Panisse recipes are meant to inspire the cook to create his or her own version; to awaken the senses to the nuances of taste, texture, and color in cooking; to "discover the ecstatic moments when the intuition, skill, and accumulated experience of the cook merge with the taste and composition of the food." Since its original publication in 1988, this classic cookbook has proved to be indispensable to the shelf of every serious cook and every serious cookbook reader.

"In Culinary Artistry...Dornenburg and Page provide food and flavor pairings as a kind of steppingstone for the recipe-dependent cook...Their hope is that once you know the scales, you will be able to compose a symphony."--Molly O'Neil in The New York Times Magazine.

For anyone who believes in the potential for artistry in the realm of food, Culinary Artistry is a must-read. This is the first book to examine the creative process of culinary composition as it explores the intersection of food, imagination, and taste. Through interviews with more than 30 of America's leading chefsa including Rick Bayless, Daniel Boulud, Gray Kunz, Jean-Louis Palladin, Jeremiah Tower, and Alice Watersa the authors reveal what defines "culinary artists," how and where they find their inspiration, and how they translate that vision to the plate. Through recipes and reminiscences, chefs discuss how they select and pair ingredients, and how flavors are combined into dishes, dishes into menus, and menus into bodies of work that eventually comprise their cuisines.

James Beard was the "dean of American cookery" (New York Times), and he put practically everything he learned about cooking into this single magnificent--now classic--cookbook. JAMES BEARD'S AMERICAN COOKERY includes more than fifteen hundred of his favorite and most successful recipes, as well as advice on dozens of cooking questions, from choosing meats and vegetables to preserving fruit and making real cheeseburgers. A celebration of the roots of cooking in the American style, this repackaged edition features the original text and color illustrations, and a new foreword by Tom Colicchio. Like Mastering the Art of French Cooking and The Joy of Cooking, it is a standard reference no kitchen is complete without.

The Ultimate Food Lover's Guide to the South

In the spirit of Ed Levine's New York Eats and Patricia Wells's Food Lover's Guide to Paris, this is the first-ever guide to the people and places that are institutions in Southern food. Much more than the ordinary guidebook list of every smoke shack from Hattiesburg to Hahira, Southern Belly tells the story behind the food, people, and places that have become Southern legends. Included are more than 200 eateries that run the gamut from chicken shacks, fish camps, and meat 'n' three joints; profiles of civil rights leaders; and veteran barbecue pitmasters. Fully illustrated, this book captures the soul of Southern food culture.

In recipes and reminiscences equally delicious, Edna Lewis celebrates the uniquely American country cooking she grew up with some fifty years ago in a small Virginia Piedmont farming community that had been settled by freed slaves. With menus for the four seasons, she shares the ways her family prepared and enjoyed food, savoring the delights of each special time of year:

• The feasts of summer—garden-ripe vegetables and fruits relished at the peak of flavor . . . pan-fried chicken, sage-flavored pork tenderloin, spicy baked tomatoes, corn pudding, fresh blackberry cobbler, and more, for hungry neighbors on Wheat-Threshing Day . . . Sunday Revival, the event of the year, when Edna’s mother would pack up as many as fifteen dishes (what with her pickles and breads and pies) to be spread out on linen-covered picnic tables under the church’s shady oaks . . . hot afternoons cooled with a bowl of crushed peaches or hand-cranked custard ice cream.

• The harvest of fall—a fine dinner of baked country ham, roasted newly dug sweet potatoes, and warm apple pie after a day of corn-shucking . . . the hunting season, with the deliciously “different” taste of game fattened on hickory nuts and persimmons . . . hog-butchering time and the making of sausages and liver pudding . . . and Emancipation Day with its rich and generous thanksgiving dinner.

• The hearty fare of winter—holiday time, the sideboard laden with all the special foods of Christmas for company dropping by . . . the cold months warmed by stews, soups, and baked beans cooked in a hearth oven to be eaten with hot crusty bread before the fire.

The scores of recipes for these marvelous dishes are set down in loving detail. We come to understand the values that formed the remarkable woman—her love of nature, the pleasure of living with the seasons, the sense of community, the satisfactory feeling that hard work was always rewarded by her mother’s good food. Having made us yearn for all the good meals she describes in her memories of a lost time in America, Edna Lewis shows us precisely how to recover, in our own country or city or suburban kitchens, the taste of the fresh, good, natural country cooking that was so happy a part of her girlhood in Freetown, Virginia.

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A comprehensive, deeply personal, and visually stunning guide to growing and cooking vegetables from Britain’s foremost food writer, with more than 400 recipes and extensive gardening notes.

In the tradition of Roast Chicken and Other Stories comes Tender, a passionate guide to savoring the best the garden has to offer. An instant classic when it was first published in the UK, Tender is a cookbook, a primer on produce, and above all, a beloved author’s homage to his favorite vegetables. Slater’s inspired and inspiring writing makes this a book to sit with and savor as much as one to prop open in the kitchen. The chapters explore 29 vegetables and offer enticing, comforting recipes such as Potato Cakes with Chard and Taleggio, a Tart of asparagus and Tarragon, and Grilled Lamb with Eggplant and Za’atar. With wit, enthusiasm, and a charming lack of pretension, Slater champions vegetables—through hands-on nurturing in the garden and straightforward preparations in the kitchen—with this truly essential book for every kitchen library.

Recipes for Mastering the French Kitchen

"Classic French Cooking is a collection of iconic recipes that are the base from which all other French cooking derives. Luard is very conscious that classical French cuisine can be complicated and lengthy on method and that most home cooks do not have endless hours to prepare family meals, nor are they always willing to give over an entire day to cook for a dinner party. She has analyzed the methods carefully and wherever possible has simplified the process without losing the most important feature of the French kitchen--flavor. Luard has demystified the process with her common sense approach. And for this reason "Classic French Cooking is an exciting and welcome addition to any cook's library. Her text is thorough and the pages are peppered with her enchanting line drawings of dishes, kitchen utensils, ingredients and market stalls.